“A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.”

—  Grace Hopper

The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper (1987)
Context: We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Dec. 12, 2025. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a n…" by Grace Hopper?
Grace Hopper photo
Grace Hopper22
American computer scientist and United States Navy officer 1906–1992

Related quotes

“The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.”

James Cameron (journalist) (1911–1985) British journalist

Cameron Country, broadcast on BBC TV, July 12, 1969.

Herman Kahn photo

“The final outcome of benevolent, informed, and intelligent decisions may turn out to be disastrous. But choices must be made; dies must be cast.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

“Knowledge can be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of symbols in a computer.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), p. 9; cited in Daniel J. Power (2004) Decision Support Systems: Frequently Asked Questions. p. 23

“If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions.”

Susanne K. Langer book Philosophy in a New Key

Philosophy in a New Key (1941)

Ray Kurzweil photo

“Once a computer achieves human intelligence it will necessarily roar past it.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999)

“If quantum communication and quantum computation are to flourish, a new information theory will have to be developed.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 25, Zeilingers Principle, Information at the root of reality, p. 231

“To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, "Modern Systems Theory – An Outlook for Coping with Change", paper given in the 1970 John Umstead Distinguished Lectures at North Carolina Department of Mental Health, Research Division, on 5 February 1970, and appeared in Revue Francaise de Sociologie, October 1969, p. 16
1970s and later

Seymour Cray photo

“I talk to myself through the computer. I ask myself questions, leave things to be looked at again, things that you would do with a notepad. It turns out today that it’s much better today to do with a personal computer rather than a notepad.”

Seymour Cray (1925–1996) Applied mathematician, computer scientist, and electrical engineer

Video History interview (1995)

“We must not forget, in all the enthusiasm for computer simulations, occasionally we must look at Nature as She is.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

“A guy gave me a job at an information booth, no questions asked.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

Related topics